OPEC? Who dat?

When was the last time you saw a headline with the word ‘OPEC’?
Right. It’s been long enough since OPEC played a role in the price of a barrel of oil that many people can’t remember who that is.

But I remember.

I’m old enough to remember sitting in long lines of cars – before the sun came up – hoping to get a few gallons of gas in my tank before the service station ran out. That was back during the administration of the first pussy president when OPEC decided to squeeze most of the life out of western economies. Mostly just because they could.

What reduced OPEC from Henry Potter stature to mere three-card monte grifters? The fact that then, OPEC produced the majority of the world’s oil – now they don’t.

So, who does? Free-market capitalists. True free-market capitalists have taken the fuel weapon away from those that would use it against the U.S.; and they’ve done that mainly through the shale oil revolution and the single most successful method for extracting oil from shale – fracking.
Free market capitalists were able to free America from the tyranny of OPEC by doing what free-market capitalists do best – make money.
Yea, that’s right – they set out to make money, as much money as they could. They thought up new ways to do stuff, invested their own money into development and in the process made us all a little bit richer – and a little more free.

And they did that in spite of the leftists that have been trying to sell their own solutions to the problem that free-market capitalists have already solved.

Mabus declared that biofuels give “us an edge tactically” and “an edge strategically.” And then came the money line, the words that have been used to justify the biofuel madness for more than a decade: Biofuels, claimed Mabus, prevent “fuel from being used as a weapon against us.”

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biofuel boosters have used the military to get their hands on taxpayer money

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Today, ethanol distilleries are consuming about 40 percent of all domestic corn output in order to produce fuel equivalent of about 600,000 barrels of oil per day. (Total U.S. consumption in 2014 averaged about 19 million barrels per day.) And it took roughly four decades of mandates and subsidies for the corn-ethanol industry to grow to that size.

Let’s compare that result with what has happened in the oil patch. Since 2006, thanks to the shale revolution, domestic oil production has increased by more than 3.6 million barrels per day. Thus, in just this past decade, the oil sector has increased production by six times the total output of every ethanol distillery in America. That increased oil production didn’t happen because of congressional mandates or subsidies. It happened because privately owned companies risked billions of dollars, and in doing so they innovated in everything from drill bits to mud pumps. The result: dramatic decreases in oil and natural-gas prices, which are now saving American consumers billions of dollars per year.